Defending the Christian faith and promoting its wisdom against the secular and religious challenges of our day.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Integrity and the Unitarian Church

The church was dressed in the banner, “Community of Love,”
and the sermon was exquisitely crafted. She argued in favor of the need for
integrity. Our insides had to match our outsides - what we say and do. Anything
less is hypocrisy, and it can be smelled for miles.

How to achieve integrity? This is where things got a bit
fuzzy. The preacher admitted that she didn’t always carry herself with
integrity. Sometimes, the image that she was presenting to the world didn’t
match the internal substance, but this dissonance is just an unavoidable
product of the complexities of the age.

However, she did finish her sermon with some admonitions
about acquiring integrity – walk in the rain, feel the wind and even taste some
soil.

Perhaps it was only me, but I found something lacking and
wondered if others sensed as much. I approached some of the congregants as
winsomely as I could, although I’m sure that others would have performed much
better than me.

After assuring them that I really was very impressed with
the sermon – and perhaps this was somewhat lacking in integrity – I asked if
they were satisfied with the pastor’s final admonition? However, they seemed to
be a bit confused by my question, and so I spelled it out:

By
advising people to merely feel the wind and the rain, even though she just
meant this poetically, do you feel that she was able to give the
congregants something that they needed?

The first two gentlemen were evidently not intrigued by my
question and promptly excused themselves. The third gentleman was more patient.
He explained that she was trying to be a peace-maker, rather than instructing
people what they had to do. Perhaps, puzzled by m question, he asked about my
religious background, since I clearly wasn’t a Unitarian.

I explained that I am a Christian, although I had been
raised Jewish. I was hoping that he would have asked me for my testimony, but
instead he asked, “What type of Christian are you?”

I didn’t want to be overly provocative by answering with
that despised term, “Fundamentalist,” and so I answered, “Evangelical.” I went
on to explain:

It is
so true, as the pastor had preached, that integrity is so elusive. There
are just so many things pulling upon us – so many psychological forces
that prey upon us.

He nodded approvingly. I wrongly took this as encouragement
to continue:

Integrity
had been completely unreachable for me for many years. I so desperately
needed the approval of others that I could not longer distinguish façade
from the reality of who I was. It was only through the assurance of the
love and forgiveness I have found through Jesus the Messiah that I have
been able to accept the truth about myself – that I am not the deserving
person that I had tried to believe that I was.

The gentleman cut me off:

Although
I can respect the fact that this has worked for you, everyone you see here
is unable to accept this answer, and you can’t expect them to!

I wanted to explain that some realities are just so forceful
and pervasive that we aren’t free to choose our own ways. Instead of inventing
another more congenial way, we have to conform to that one reality. Like\wise,
we are not free to re-envision the laws of physics to suit ourselves. Instead,
we have to conform to them. We can’t
jump off of a building, expecting that gravity is going to conform to our
tastes. Instead, we have to conform to the workings of gravity.

However, with a good-bye touch to my shoulder, he too was
gone, and I also left the church, passing the “community of love” banner. I
guess it was "just an unavoidable product of the complexities of the
age.”